Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

Three overall visions of Civil War memory collided and combined over time: one, the reconciliationist vision, which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than the history of Reconstruction has allowed us to believe; two, the white supremacist vision, which took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn of the century delivered the country a segregated memory of its Civil War on Southern terms; and three, the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. In the end this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race.

Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas—healing and justice.

In many ways, this is a story of how in American culture romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory. For Americans broadly, the Civil War has been a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture, we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies. The greatest enthusiasts for Civil War history and memory often displace complicated consequences by endlessly focusing on the contest itself. We sometimes lift ourselves out of historical time, above the details, and render the war safe in a kind of national Passover offering as we view a photograph of the Blue and Gray veterans shaking hands across the stone walls at Gettysburg. Deeply embedded in an American mythology of mission, and serving as a mother lode of nostalgia for antimodernists and military history buffs, the Civil War remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism. Over time, Americans have needed deflections from the deeper meanings of the Civil War. It haunts us still; we feel it, to borrow from Warren, but often do not face it.

The supreme “testing” of that “government of the people” about which Lincoln had spoken so carefully at Gettysburg was precisely Douglass’s subject as well. In language far more direct than Lincoln’s, Douglass announced that the “abolition war” and “peace” he envisioned would never be “completed until the black men of the South, and the black men of the North, shall have been admitted, fully and completely, into the body politic of America.”16 Here, in late 1863, he demanded immediate suffrage for blacks. In such expressions of equality, Douglass, too, looked beyond Appomattox to the long struggle to preserve in reality and memory what the war could create.

Whitman understood the war as America’s own tragic recreation, a whole people reborn as something new by tearing themselves inside out. Words alone did not remake America, but they were mighty weapons in the myth-making that the Civil War inevitably produced.

He almost never called the conflict a “civil war”; it was to him forever the “Secession War.”29 He threw blame for the war’s outbreak, which he welcomed, on all those who had ever threatened America’s unified destiny. Whitman loathed Southern “fireaters” and Northern “abolitionists” with equal disdain.

Whitman’s “real war” did not ultimately include the revolution in black freedom of 1863; his own myriad uses of rebirth metaphors did not encompass black equality. This poet of democracy, whose work can and has been used to advance an antiracist tradition, never truly faced the long-term implications of emancipation.

Politically, Whitman became a devotee of Johnson and his lenient, state-rights approach to Reconstruction policy.30 Whitman did not believe blacks capable of exercising the suffrage, and he viewed radical Reconstruction policies with the same contempt he had felt for abolitionists. “The republicans have exploited the Negro too intensely,” he wrote to his mother in 1868, “and there comes a reaction.” By 1875, Whitman had described Reconstruction racial affairs in words that would become with time the staple mythology of white Southern, and much Northern, comprehension of the aftermath of emancipation. “The black domination,” he wrote, “but little above the beasts—viewed as a temporary, deserv’d punishment for their [Southern whites’] Slavery and Secession sins, may perhaps be admissible; but as a permanency of course is not to be consider’d for a moment.”31 Here again, Whitman spoke for a growing consensus. The image of Reconstruction as black domination, radical ideology taken too far, would become one of the deepest strains of American historical consciousness in the next generation.

Whitman wrote of a war that would purge and unify the whole nation. Southerners were never really enemies to Whitman; they were family members to be nursed to their necessary deaths or revived to health.

Black men too expected a soldier’s due out of this war—safe firesides, public recognition, and a place in at least some form of reconciliation between blacks and whites. Indeed, both Wester and Hoyle, like the more famous Douglass before them, were convinced that in equal suffering, if not in natural law, the country might discover the roots of equal rights. In this sense, for black soldiers and their future families, equality was another word for reconciliation. These black soldiers had no trouble defining the meaning of freedom and the war; they were only beginning the long struggle to protect the memory of their story, one they already considered comparable to the older conquest of “Pharoah and his host.”34 They knew the older story well: Moses did not make it to the promised land, but many of his foot soldiers and his people did.

Sherman faced a tremendous dilemma: what to do with so many refugee freedpeople, and how to begin to define their status. He and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton decided to ask the opinions of the representative black leadership of Savannah and of the very Georgia counties through which Sherman’s troops had wreaked devastation. Twenty black ministers, most of whom had been slaves at some time in their lives, and some of whom had achieved freedom only in the past month at the hands of the Union armies, sat in a room together, face to face with Sherman and Stanton. Twelve carefully worded questions were written out and read aloud to the ministers. The answers as well were “written down in . . . exact words” and “read over” by each participant so as to determine “concurrence or dissent.”35 These words, like the Gettysburg Address, might not remake America, but everyone present seemed to understand that their articulation was a part of that process.

Asked how the freedpeople could best take care of themselves and assist the government, Frazier provided a motto for the early struggles of Reconstruction: “The way we can best take care of ourselves,” said Frazier, “is to have land . . . we want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” To assist the government in executing this revolution, “the young men should enlist in the service . . . and serve in such manner as they may be wanted.”36

Then Frazier was asked to examine the “causes and object” of the war itself, and he responded with a poignant history lecture: I understand, as to the war, that the South is the aggressor. President Lincoln was elected President by a majority of the United States, which guaranteed him the right of holding the office and exercising that right over the whole United States. The South, without knowing what he would do, rebelled. . . . The object of the war was not at first to give the slaves their freedom, but the sole object of the war was at first to bring the rebellious states back into the Union and their loyalty to the laws of the United States. Afterward, knowing the value set on the slaves by the Rebels, the President thought that his Proclamation would stimulate them to lay down their arms, reduce them to obedience, and help to bring back the Rebel States; and their not doing so has now made the freedom of the slaves a part of the war. It is my opinion that there is not a man in this city that could be started to help the Rebels one inch, for that would be suicide.

The evolution of Memorial Day during its first twenty years or so became a contest between three divergent, and sometimes overlapping, groups: blacks and their white former abolitionist allies, white Northerners, and white Southerners.

At the dedication of a monument in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, July 1, 1869, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher drew apocalyptic imagery, “heroic devotion,” “mothers,” and “orphans” into a single prayerful message to the next generation. “May the soldiers’ children never prove unworthy of their fathers’ name,” said Beecher; “let them be willing to shed their blood, to lay down their lives, for the sake of their country.” The transfer of a nationalistic legacy of heroism to the next generation took hold early. Veterans would struggle with this burden—as they laid it on their children—for decades.

the Southern “memorial movement . . . helped the South assimilate the fact of defeat,” as Gaines Foster writes, without repudiating the defeated.”22 Memorialization functioned as a ritual, a way of coping with loss on a profound scale.

This statue of Stonewall Jackson was unveiled in Richmond on Capitol Square, October 26, 1875, in the first large parade of Confederate veterans held after the war.

To avoid any exhibition of racial mixing, Kemper even eliminated the Virginia General Assembly from the march, where a few black Republicans still served.

As orator of the day, the Virginia legislature chose the Reverend Moses Drury Hoge, pastor of the Richmond Second Presbyterian Church. During the war, Hoge had given the daily prayer at the Confederate Congress and served as a blockade runner as well as chaplain at a Richmond training camp. Confederate defeat had apparently crushed Hoge psychologically in 1865. But ten years later, on that bright autumn day, he rose to the occasion and announced that Southerners were living in a “new era of our history.” Preparing Lost Causers for the long haul, Hoge declared “defeat” the “discipline which trains the truly heroic soul.” In his finale, Hoge reached his most important theme: the overthrow of Reconstruction and the demand for a political return to a status quo antebellum. “If it be objected that we have already entered upon one of those political revolutions that never go backward,” Hoge proclaimed, “then I ask, who gave to anyone the authority to say so?” Hoge summoned the audience to return to the old ways, to the old nation. Their duty in the new era was to return to “a Union as our fathers framed . . . the Constitution in its old supremacy.”34 Amidst a massive performance of Confederate remembrance on this day, neither the Gettysburg Address nor the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments existed. In short, the civic meaning of emancipation itself fell among the litter on the streets of Richmond. As Southerners mourned their dead hero and their dead Confederacy, ...

On Decoration Day in Boston in 1874, the Charles Russell Lowell Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) assembled for a sermon in West Church by the Reverend C. A. Bartol. In an effort entitled “The Soldier’s Motive,” Bartol honored the blind faith of warriors who forget themselves in devotion to a cause. Conviction, duty, and obedience with an “abandonment that neither reserves its resources nor counts the cost,” said Bartol, “is the all-surpassing reason for our approval and love.” This theme, what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., would later famously term the “Soldier’s Faith,” would become a standard feature of memorial and reunion rhetoric. The soldierly virtue of devotion, whatever the cause, was within a decade of the war already well-rehearsed as a means to sectional peace.

The New York Herald set the tone for the occasion a day in advance by offering a vision of an American character free of the burdens of the past: “The man whose memory dates back over a month is voted a bore, and accused of being interested in ancient history.”

But Pryor did not restrict himself merely to the subject of the heroic soldier. Given such a forum, the Confederate partisan gave a full-throated condemnation of Reconstruction as “that dismal period—massacres of the helpless, violations of the ballot, usurpations of force on the popular will and the independence of the States.” Pryor fashioned a beguiling version of the evil image of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction years were a time, he said, of “alien rule and federal domination by which sovereign states were reduced to the impotence of satrapies.” The reunion now possible after the Compromise of 1877 was, therefore, a victory over Reconstruction, over racial equality, and over federal enforcement against the South. “Fallen it [Reconstruction] is at last,” declared Pryor, “fallen like Lucifer never to hope again; fallen by the thunderbolt of the people’s wrath.”49 Twelve years after Appomattox, a former Confederate general and voice of the Lost Cause explained to his Yankee audience, many of whom were Union veterans, that the South’s vindication was the nation’s triumph. Long live the new Union, Pryor in effect announced—a Union saved from the Devil of radical Republicanism and black suffrage by the Confederate veteran. Over the next four decades, this theme would continue to flourish in new literary and political forms.

Pryor did not hide the issue of race behind a rhetoric of reunion. The war had nothing directly to do with slavery, he proclaimed, in what became an article of faith to Southern vindicationists and their Northern allies. Southerners were comfortably reconciled to the destruction of slavery because it had only been the “occasion not the cause of secession.” Slavery was an impersonal force in history, a natural phenomenon subject only to divine control and beyond all human responsibility. It was good while it lasted, good once it was gone; no Southerner fought in its defense, and no Northerner died to end it. It just went away, like a change in the weather. Pryor declared with audacious confidence that “impartial history will record that slavery fell not by any effort of man’s will, but by the immediate intervention and act of the Almighty himself; and in the anthem of praise ascending to heaven for the emancipation of four million human beings, the voice of the Confederate soldier mingles its note of devout gratulation.”50 In such selective and politically charged uses of memory, the devout could claim anything. Everyone responsible for slavery—and the war—had already achieved absolution, even a resurrection. To Pryor, Southerners were the best Unionists because they understood fully how radical Reconstruction had been a scheme “devised to balk the ambition of the white race.” Southerners knew best how their own “shelter and support” lay within the Union because of the fear...

In a column entitled “Memorial Day,” Tourgée resented that the original name, “Decoration Day,” had waned and that the “festival of flowers” had been ransomed for “a little cheap laudation, in silly deference to a sickly sentimentality.” The holiday had become one only of calculated forgetting, the veteran moaned into his pipe. “To dwell upon the hero’s sufferings and ignore the motive which inspired his acts,” he wrote, “is to degrade him to the level of the mercenary. Fame dwells in purpose as well as in achievement. Fortitude is sanctified only by its aim.”61

There were those at the time that talked about forgetting truth and remembering falsely

Phillips warned against the new mood overtaking national memory. “We have got an idea that forgiveness of everybody,” said Phillips, “is a virtue. We have got an idea that Christianity consists in putting our own eyes out, not knowing good from bad . . . just from unjust.” Phillips’s urgent demand of the new Congress was that they “fortify against the coming magnanimity.”17

We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to . . . remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice. I am no minister of malice . . ., I would not repel the repentant, but . . . may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflict . . . I may say if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?18

Frederick Douglass at the 1871 Memorial Day

Such spectacles of reconciliation were emotionally irresistible for most people; they carried a redemptive, uplifting appeal. They embodied patriotism, a new nationalism, and the human need for healing. But they were also the occasion for their organizers to proclaim the terms of such reconciliation. For John Underwood, the purpose of the Chicago reunion was “harmonious forgetfulness.” “It is not now profitable to discuss the right or wrong of the past,” declared Underwood, “neither should the question be raised as to the morals of Massachusetts selling her slaves and South Carolina holding hers, nor as to the profit of merchandising the negro on the block in New York or from the sugar cane fields of the Mississippi ‘coasts’ and cotton plantations in other parts of the South.”65 In this vision of the terms of Blue-Gray reunion, slavery was everyone’s and no one’s responsibility. America’s bloody racial history was to be banished from consciousness; the only notions of equality contemplated were soldiers’ heroism and the exchange of the business deal.

In Holmes’s vision, the only enemies left by 1895 were the “temptations of wallowing ease.”73 Rooted in this ideology of manliness and an antimodern scorn for commerce and materialism, which many veterans ironically felt deeply ambivalent about, the soldiers’ reunion, both metaphorically and in reality, had become by the 1890s the dominant mode of Civil War memory. If the old soldiers could find each other, bridge every bloody chasm, and celebrate their former strenuous life, then the rest of society could follow in step. That the emancipationist legacy of the Civil War was lost amidst the celebration of a soldiers’ faith and that racism never emerged as an enemy of society equal to “wallowing ease” tell us much about that epoch’s memory. When the Blue and the Gray gathered for reunions, and the press and photographers swarmed to record their spectacles, they were men from a simpler and more compelling time. As new generations of Americans came of age, as millions of immigrants flooded the country’s shores, and as racial hatred and violence reached unprecedented levels, the old veterans provided a mother lode of nostalgia to an age that needed escape from its cities, its boardrooms, its dangerous and confusing machines, and its economic panics. These old veterans did not fight about something fundamental to national self-definition or human freedom as much as they represented a prior heroic age, a time of authentic, romantic experience. Such was Holmes’s warning to the you...

Among veterans who became writers, none represented the emancipationist vision more prolifically than Albion W. Tourgée, the author of numerous satires on reconciliation.

In 1887, Tourgée reflected on the explosion of writing on Civil War themes. American readers had come to love the war, Tourgée contended, because by the mid-1880s the political culture had practiced a perverse combination of “oblivion” and “morbid sentimentality” about the conflict. In the interest of reconciliation, questions of “right” and “wrong” in the war and its aftermath were all but banished from political discourse during and after Reconstruction. The very essence of the war’s meaning and responsibility were, in Tourgée’s view, sacrificed on the altar of reunion. The “unparalleled benignity” of the American people, he wrote, “has gone so far that there was even a tendency to forget altogether the fact that a war could not be waged for the preservation of the Union unless some one was responsible for the attempt to destroy it.”17

Tourgée identified some of the most enduring dilemmas in Civil War remembrance. He dared to say, in season and out, that the war and its aftermath were all about race.

In its earliest manifestations, therefore, the Lost Cause was born out of grief, but just as importantly, it formed in the desire to contend for control of the nation’s memory.

Referring to one such speech, Mosby reacted: “Why not talk about witchcraft if as he said, slavery was not the cause of the war. I always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarrelled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery.” Mosby spurned virtually all Lost Cause arguments about slavery. “I can’t see how setting the negroes free could have saved the Union,” he remarked in 1894, “unless slavery was the cause of the breach.”

Remembering the thrill of emancipation, experiencing the pride of citizenship, witnessing the growth of black education and intellectual achievement, and building new black institutions all afforded the emancipationist vision fertile ground in which to take root.6 The story of the centrality of slavery and emancipation to Civil War history and memory made sense to most blacks.

Later that evening at the First Congregational Church, Frederick Douglass spoke to a racially mixed audience and called them to vigilance in the cause of black liberty and citizenship. “As the war for the Union recedes into the past,” admonished Douglass, “and the negro is no longer needed to assault forts and stop rebel bullets, he is in some sense of less importance. Peace with the old master class has been war for the negro. As the one has risen the other has fallen.” The implications of the cultural turn toward reconciliation for blacks could hardly have been more starkly expressed.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1883, a debate ensued among black leaders over whether to convene a national convention to bring their grievances to the attention of the nation. State conventions of black civic and religious leaders were still common occurrences in these years, with some advocating independence from the Republican Party. But other black spokesmen believed that the day for separate black conventions had passed with the war and the Constitutional victories of Reconstruction. Still others, like Fortune, resisted a convention initially planned for Washington, preferring a Southern city where “the problem for solution is to be found.” Eventually a national assembly of more than one hundred black leaders from virtually every state met in Louisville, Kentucky, in late September. After intense debate, the assembly officially refused to endorse President Chester Arthur and the Republican Party. The convention’s resolutions included an appeal to memory. The delegates announced their gratitude for “the miraculous emancipation” and adopted the language of national rebirth. But the bulk of their eleven resolutions were demands for the enforcement of civil and political rights, protests against prevailing economic conditions, and an insistence on equal education for black youth. The convention pronounced the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction “nothing more than dead letters.”12 Twenty years after emancipation, i...

The delegates from the Louisville convention had hardly returned home when the U.S. Supreme Court landed a bombshell in the lap of black America. A group of civil rights cases had been pending before the Supreme Court throughout the year, including one in Kansas and another in Missouri of blacks denied accommodations at inns, a case from California of rejection from a theater, and a variety of instances of exclusion from first-class railway cars. The ruling in United States v. Stanley (also known as the civil rights cases) held that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to states; a person wronged by racial discrimination, therefore, could look for redress only from state laws and courts. In effect, the decision meant that the discriminatory acts of private persons were beyond the safeguards of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal jurisdiction. In relegating enforcement of civil rights laws only to state authority, the court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, rendering the entire meaning and intent of the Civil War Constitutional Amendments “sacrificed,” as the lone dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, put it. The door was now open for the eventual passage of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Most African Americans heeded some version of the warning of Joseph C. Price, the young black educator and founder of Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. “The South was more conquered than convinced,” said Price in 1890; “it was overpowered rather than fully persuaded. The Confederacy surrendered its sword at Appomattox, but did not there surrender its convictions.”19

It was America’s national tragedy that the memories of slavery that were popularized and sold in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the romantic fantasies of dialect writers, not the actual remembrance of ex-slaves themselves.

They aimed to provide not only a usable past, but a sense of ultimate “racial triumph” for black folk in America.

Washington carried such a message through to his last days: material progress by blacks would foment white admiration and, therefore, lead to the truest form of national and racial reconciliation. In a tribute to Harriet Tubman in Auburn, New York, in June 1914, where the former liberator of fugitive slaves had recently died, Washington linked past and present in his peculiar way. Tubman was best remembered, he declared, as a symbol of the “law-abiding Negro,” a leader who “brought the two races nearer together and made it possible for the white race to know the black race.” By reciting the acreage of land ownership and the numbers of houses, grocery stores, dry goods stores, shoe stores, drug stores, and banks owned by blacks fifty years after freedom, Washington found the best evidence that “the work of Harriet Tubman was not in vain.” Tubman had long been a malleable icon of America’s antislavery past. But Washington’s appropriation of this revolutionary activist who broke many laws to liberate slaves, in order to create a narrative of “racial friendship,” showed less the measure of “progress” than the bankruptcy of Bookerite reconciliation.58

In May 1898, Mitchell launched a propaganda campaign under the slogan: “No Officers, No Fight!” The idea caught on widely in the black press. At its root, Mitchell’s slogan carried the insistence on real political gains at home before any blacks should die abroad. Writing from the city where the huge Lee monument stood high above the emerging Monument Avenue of Confederate heroes, Mitchell offered the black side of a bargain. “We are not rushing forward now to die,” he announced. “We have done our part of that kind of serious business, for sixty thousand victims of the Ku Klux Klan, the white-caps, the lynchers, the miscellaneous hordes of red-handed murderers are sleeping beneath the sod, and souls . . . go marching on.”18 In this variation on the legacy of “John Brown’s Body,” Mitchell demonstrated that the subtext of virtually all black response to the Spanish-American and Philippine wars was violence toward blacks at home.

Modeled on Jonathan Swift’s story “A Modest Proposal,” Du Bois called his satire “A Mild Suggestion.” Similar to Johnson’s parable on the Pullman car, Du Bois placed five characters on the deck of a ship: a Little Old Lady, a Westerner, a Southerner, a New Yorker, and a Colored Man. They are discussing the “Negro Problem” within hearing of the Colored Man, and suggest the usual solutions of education, work, and emigration. Finally they ask the black man his opinion. He sits down and lays out his “perfect solution.” He urges rejection of education because it will only lead to “ambition, dissatisfaction and revolt,” scorns work because it can only foment job competition and the disruption of social circles, and refuses emigration because it is impractical. Instead, he proposes that on January 1, 1913,

The story goes on to suggest killing all Blacks so that there will no longer be “a negro problem”

The veterans, as well as the gazing crowds, had come to commemorate a glorious fight; and in the end, everyone was right, no one was wrong, and something so transforming as the Civil War had been rendered a mutual victory of the Blue and the Gray by what Virginia governor Mann called the “splendid movement of reconciliation.”9

The 50th anniversary celebration of Gettysburg